What Every Prospective Convert to Judaism Deserves To Know

When you go to a doctor, you initially have to complete and sign a
plethora of forms. There are the checkboxes for all imaginable
ailments and diseases, and you begin to realize “Yikes! There are so
many things in me that can go wrong, it’s a miracle that I even can
read this thing and check the boxes!” There are more forms: the
agreement to arbitrate disputes, the permission to share the private
medical information with other care providers, the acknowledgements
that you have been given the forms to read.

Later, if you need to go in for a medical procedure, you typically
receive “full disclosure” of what theoretically could go wrong. And
then you must sign a form acknowledging that you received full
disclosure. Because, even with the safest medical procedure and the
most skillful doctor, unpredictable things theoretically could go
wrong.

When you watch those pharmaceutical commercials on television for any
of the many prescription drugs that you cannot even get unless your
physician prescribes them, it seems like half the commercial is
consumed with the full-disclosure listing of what could go wrong:
“This medicine might explode your liver, pulverize your kidneys, cause
your eyes to fall out, lead to delirious panic attacks, instant heart
failure, head turning upside-down, ears uncontrollably flapping, nose
falling off — so, if you have occasional acid indigestion, ask your
doctor to prescribe this medicine today.”

In addition to being a rabbi and an attorney, I have been an adjunct
professor of law at two major law schools these past fourteen years.
In one of my courses, the curriculum includes teaching new-client
intake. I teach my students that they always must fully disclose to
prospective new clients the billing arrangements and what costs the
client might encounter in the forthcoming litigation. Attorneys
likewise should fully disclose the prospective client’s prospects if
the litigation ensues. In other words, a prospective client needs
full disclosure to know what he or she is getting into — what it will
cost, how much might be won, what the odds of success might be, what
downside might be encountered, how long a case might take to reach
trial, and what level of personal stress the client might expect to
endure while engaging in the aggravation of a full-blown American
litigation.

Because “Full Disclosure” is so important in so many walks of American
life, I also always provide full disclosure in my rabbinic role when a
prospective convert to Judaism comes my way. I can think of few things
more painful than when I meet someone who thought, years earlier, that
she had converted to Judaism in accordance with proper standards, only
to learn years later that no rabbi — not in Israel and not in America
— will conduct her children’s marriages nor deem her or them Jewish.

There is perhaps nothing more inspiring than meeting a prospective
“Jew by Choice.” Becoming a Jew is a serious undertaking, a
life-changing event that will impact one’s future generations for
eternity. A kosher conversion, compliant with Orthodox requirements,
entails not only wanting to be Jewish but, more realistically,
undertaking to live the mitzvot of the Torah — including the “Written
Torah” commandments that we find in the Bible as well as the “Oral
Torah” mitzvot included in the Talmud and in the subsequent
generations of Halakhic Responsa penned by the leading Torah
authorities of the respective generations. It is for that reason that
a normative Orthodox conversion takes approximately two years.

Certainly, the mitzvot themselves can be taught in rudimentary form in
merely a few months, but the Orthodox conversion process also entails
living those mitzvot daily, day after day, week after week, month
after month, year after year. Thus, it is not enough to “know” the
rules of kosher. Rather, one must live them 24/7. It is not
sufficient to pass a quiz on the laws of Shabbat. Rather, one must
live them the full 25 hours from Friday sunset to Saturday nightfall
every week. For that reason, for example, we mainstream Orthodox
rabbis require a prospective convert to live within walking distance
of the shul where they will be studying and worshipping — because it
is forbidden to drive on the Shabbat.

Consider the analogy of the high school student who scores 100% on her
sophomore-year biology final exam. She then proceeds through life
never studying any additional biology. In college, she majors in
“soft sciences”: political science, sociology, philosophy. By age 30
and 40 she presumably still will remember that table salt is NaCl
(sodium chloride) and that amoebas split, but she no longer will carry
a great amount of the biology knowledge that she once mastered. And
so with an Orthodox conversion: It is not enough for a prospective
convert to pass a test on whether she knows the text of each brakhah
(blessing) to recite before eating respective foods. Rather, the
person must actually recite those blessings every time they apply
thenceforth.

In my 36 years since being ordained an Orthodox rabbi, I have met a
great many people who have approached me for an Orthodox conversion,
explaining that they already had undergone a Reform conversion or a
Conservative conversion, but now had come to realize that it was the
Orthodox conversion they desired. In the course of my first meeting
with such a person, it often will emerge that the person had learned
excellently from the conscientious and devoted Conservative rabbi, for
example, all the blessings that are recited for the various foods, but
that knowledge had been imparted five or ten years earlier, and now
the person simply cannot pull together the words from her mind for
reciting the blessing. Over time she had forgotten “the stuff.” By
contrast, once she has converted in an Orthodox construct, she never
again will lack facility with the brakhot because she will have
internalized the practice of reciting them continually when
applicable, day in and day out, 24/7, for the rest of her life.

In this same context, it is imperative that every prospective convert
demand — not “ask,” not “inquire,” but demand — of the converting
rabbi to know, to receive a full disclosure, as to whether the
conversion will be accepted elsewhere. That is, if I am converting
with a Reform rabbi, is the rabbi properly affiliated with the Central
Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR — the Reform rabbinic conference)?
Will other Reform temples accept the conversion? Will Conservative
rabbis accept the Reform rabbi’s conversion? What if my Reform
conversion to Judaism does not include entering a kosher mikveh — will
Conservative rabbis accept the conversion anyway? Will my future
children have a problem being recognized as Jewish?

For many Reform converts, some or all of these questions may not
matter because the person converting may not be consumed by concerns
like those set forth above, but there still is value in receiving the
full disclosure, just as we value the panoply of full disclosures we
receive when we are approved for a mortgage or undergo a medical
procedure.

Similarly, if pursuing a conversion by a Conservative rabbi, is that
rabbi a member in good standing of the Rabbinical Assembly (RA — the
professional association of Conservative rabbis)? If not, why not?
Will other Conservative rabbis accept a conversion done by a
Conservative rabbi outside the RA? Will Reform recognize it? Will
the Orthodox? How will that affect my children, my grandchildren?
How will it be treated in America? In Israel? And — perhaps just as
important — beyond the Israel/America question, beyond the Reform/
Conservative/ Orthodox question: If my grandchild or great-grandchild
meets and falls in love with a Jewish person from a traditional Jewish
family someday twenty or fifty years in the future, will their chance
for a lifetime of happiness in building a faithful Jewish home be
supported or set back by the way that mainstream normative Jewish
families regard this conversion’s acceptability?

Again, many of these concerns might not be immediately — nor ever —
relevant to someone who knowingly has evaluated the various
denominations and rabbis in her orbit and has chosen that rabbi and
that institution. But full disclosure always is valuable when
receiving life-impacting professional services.

The prospective convert’s demand for full discosure not only should be
made of Reform rabbis and of Conservative rabbis but even of Orthodox
rabbis. For example, there are some rabbis who present themselves as
Orthodox and who make a business, an income stream, out of converting
people. Within the mainstream normative American Orthodox rabbinate,
many among those “conversions” are not trusted because the
professionals know who the hucksters are. Likewise, within Orthodoxy
itself, there are concerns about outlier rabbis who are on the
periphery, who identify outside the mainstream normative Orthodox
rabbinate, whose interpretations of Orthodoxy are not the same as
those universally adopted by the mainstream. Many normative,
mainstream Orthodox rabbis will not recognize the authenticity of
“Orthodox conversions” conducted by such outliers. Therefore,
mainstream rabbis will not subsequently conduct marriages for such
people who have undergone such outlier conversions, and typical
mainstream Orthodx families will resist engaging in marriage-track
social relationships with such people unless they undertake an entire
new conversion process. Such people converted by such outlier rabbis
will find, to their great astonishment born of their total innocence,
that they will not be called to the Torah nor counted in a minyan in a
great many mainstream Orthodox congregations, and their future
children will not be regarded as Jewish unless the children undergo a
conversion themselves. They will learn that such conversions
conducted by outliers are tantamount to someone presenting as a
naturalized American citizen with paperwork of citizenship conferred
by a disbarred judge or by a judge who never sat on the proper federal
bench that empowers her to rule on citizenship applications under
Title 8 of the United States Code.

How, then, is a prospective convert to know, even as among “Orthodox”
rabbis, whose conversion is acceptable for other Orthodox rabbis and
whose is not? One step is to ask whether the converting rabbi is a
member in good standing of the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA).
Although a rabbi’s RCA membership is not in itself a guarantee of
Orthodox conversion acceptability — the reasons for that are beyond
the scope of this article — a prospective Orthodox convert would do
well to consider why the Orthodox rabbi is not in the RCA in the first
place, and what that says about the prospective acceptability of
conversion, how it will impact the prospective convert’s future
generations. In other words, perhaps the rabbi is a member of an
alternative rabbinical body. If so, how is that rabbinic body
regarded? (The Reform and Conservative rabbinates leave less
confusion in this regard because they are more uniformly centralized
than is Orthodoxy.) In other words, perhaps the rabbi is on some
grand personal crusade that makes RCA membership unimportant to him —
indeed, perhaps his personal philosophic crusade even has made him
ineligible for RCA membership in the first place — and perhaps he even
is on some kind of pioneering life quest to establish his own
philosophy of what Orthodox Judaism should be. All that is fine and
noble — for him. But a prospective Orthodox convert deserves and must
demand full disclosure because perhaps she is not a pioneer as the
rabbi is, and perhaps all she wants is for her Orthodox conversion to
be accepted universally here and in Israel, and to be accepted
universally for all time, for her and for her future progeny. Thus,
if she is aboard the same crusade as is her rabbi, excellent — but if
not, she deserves full disclosure.

Within the RCA, a set of conversion standards was adopted ten years
ago, in consultation with the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, to maximize a
prospective convert’s acceptability world-wide for this generation and
for her children’s and grandchildren’s and great-grandchildren’s
future generations, whether outside or in Israel. Under those
centralized standards, known in the RCA as “GPS” (Geirut Policies and
Standards), even highly respected RCA rabbis do not themselves “do”
conversions but instead “sponsor” the conversions that are overseen by
specially established GPS conversion courts throughout the United
States. The local “sponsoring” rabbi serves as the local on-site
representative of the centralized conversion court but does not do the
conversion himself. Under the conformed standards, the GPS conversion
is accepted throughout the United States and by the Israeli Chief
Rabbinate.

At the same time, there is a growing phenomenon of crusading rabbis
who fly around the country, and even into South America, telling
prospective converts that they are doing “Orthodox conversions.” In a
great many of those situations, those conversions in fact are not
recognized by mainstream, normative Orthodox rabbis anywhere in the
world, not in Israel and not in America, and the children and
grandchildren of those converts will find that mainstream normative
traditional Jewish families will not marry them unless they undergo
complete conversions all over again .

For fullest legal protection, the prospective convert should demand a
written full-disclosure letter from his or her converting rabbi,
stating whether the rabbi can guarantee that the conversion will be
accepted fully throughout America and in Israel under the standards
currently prevailing, both for the convert and for her future
generations. I provide exactly such a written assurance and full
discosure for every conversion I sponsor through GPS. (Like many of my
RCA colleagues, I sponsor an average of one conversion a year — some
years none, some years three or four — and I never accept any money
for the time and effort entailed.)

Doctors provide written full discosures. Pharmaceutical companies
provide written full disclosures. The best attorneys provide written
full disclosures. The best realtors and bank lenders provide written
full disclosures. Therefore, rabbis who are overseeing a conversion
should provide their prospective converts with written full
disclosures. The full disclosures should state whether other
mainstream rabbis and congregations in America will accept that
rabbi’s conversion, whether the conversion will be accepted by
mainstream normative rabbis and congregations in Israel, and whether
the prospective convert may proceed with the assurance and peace of
mind that the conversion will be accepted for future generations when
presented to mainstream normative rabbis and congregations in America
and Israel. If the conversion rabbi refuses and will not provide a
written full disclosure regarding the long-term and universal
prospective acceptability of the conversion he is offering to perform,
the prospective convert then is on notice that there likely will be a
severe problem with the conversion down the line and therefore might
do well to seek out someone else who can provide the written full
disclosure she seeks.

There can be almost nothing more tragic than for a person to have
invested so much of her passion, energy, life, and soul into getting
herself converted into the Jewish People — only to learn afterwards
that the process she underwent will have no force in the
denominational community where she seeks entry, leaving her — and her
children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren afterwards — with
nothing ultimately but intense sorrow and severe hardship, compounded
by the tragic recognition that she would have been a perfectly
excellent candidate for a normative mainstream conversion in the first
place.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward.

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